I’ve been at google for a decade. Zero of my projects have been cancelled. I’ve never had my work be incompatible with the work of others. Google publicly cancels a lot of products. It has a pretty bad long term product strategy. But part of that is because it has like 100000 engineers. Most people aren’t experiencing political problems.
Then, if Googlers don't have experience in solving the problems that other engineers may face, then what useful insights would even be available there? Dealing with political problems, technical debt, and changing product requirements are all core parts of navigating the software industry.
Political problems, technical debt, and changing product requirements are not the same thing as what was mentioned above.
> having the entire code base "mounted" on my dev machine My impression is that this is a result of a policy that google3 never touches a developer machine, which of course means you can't disconnect and work from a log cabin in the woods. Really sounds like bending yourself around an antipattern to be honest.
Very few people are capable of doing engineering from a cabin in the woods even if they can mirror the entire code base on their machine since engineering is a collaborative effort.
I would hope that you are able to work on self-contained projects without having to interact with other people for at least a day or two at a time…
Is there any evidence that Google is actually better at software engineering than other companies? IMHO, it seems they have enough money to deliberately do things inefficiently which would kill a smaller company, but Google can manage to succeed through brute force. Honestly I think the better example would be from a tiny company that can't afford to do things wrong.
I don't mind admitting Google employs people far smarter than I will ever be, but they're creating and maintaining the largest global spying apparatus in history. Maybe we should be learning from people who're actually making the world a better place.
Some are. It's now a giant company and recently partnerships with google bought me into contact with very average developers, gluing things together.
Not OP, but doesn't availing any particular tiny slice of all knowledge on the web to you within ~1.5 seconds, by inferring your intent incredibly accurately from a few words , count as "building robust systems ... that push the envelopes of what humanity is capable of"? Or, how about a video distribution network that serves more than 600,000 hours of video every minute, and manages to do that such that, every time s…
Yeah, I guess before Google you did have to wait 5 whole seconds to get the same information, because of all the ads AltaVista spewed at you along with their search results. Progress. As for YouTube, it was bought, not created by Google, wasn't it?
a typical search on altavista in its prime often took 30 seconds. Most of the results would be totally irrelevant.
Is there any evidence that Google is actually better at software engineering than other companies? IMHO, it seems they have enough money to deliberately do things inefficiently which would kill a smaller company, but Google can manage to succeed through brute force. Honestly I think the better example would be from a tiny company that can't afford to do things wrong.
Maybe 10 years ago when they were pushing the envelope. Nowadays, I just don’t see it to be honest. There are a few brilliant engineers for sure, but the new generation are mostly Leetcoders that brag about TC on another social network. You can see it in their open source code too. Critical bugs not fixed for an entire year. You read the code and it doesn’t stand out as anything out of the ordinary. I get the feeling…
I work at Google, and previously at Amazon, I was a bit upset reading your comment, but I have to be honest with myself, you are right. I "admire" more indiehackers and other technical founders than Staff Engineers and the like at Google. On the tech side you are also correct, the innovation at Google is minimal, we all work on somebody else's projects, promotion work and career development. Regarding interviewing, you are also correct, it have become a Leetcode grind fest, that certain demographic nails more often than not, due to their ability to give up life and memorize Leetcode solutions and System Design patterns non stop. I'm jealous of people who find a real life problem and start a company to monetize a solution that actually help people.
TrueTime and spanner definitely fall in the wow category at least for me Microsoft one of the worlds top software companies couldn’t keep up with chrome. There are a lot of projects that look easy at a POC stage and are very different at million of users, millions of tps, millions of TB or full featured
Chrome was released in 2008. Microsoft is doing fine with Edge, though it's a moot point because Microsoft is even older and more sluggish than Google. Spanner seems a prototypical Google dev product though; it's only invented to serve Google. I don't think any of their solutions is the de facto choice in any tech stack.
Spanner is definitely the system I would want to use if I had $$$, ran on GCP, and needed to do large-scale distributed database processing.
It was invented to serve Google (really: the people who had outgrown bigtable's limited featureset) but is widely applicable.
These are some really uncharitable takes. A lot of us have found value in the author’s writing and code contributions over the years, many of which he made on his own time. This type of post is subjective by nature, give the guy a break.
Software Engineers are not Engineers they are Professional Musicians. They need their Algorithms and Data Structures knowledge, the same way a Jazz musician needs the circle of fifths and a deep understanding of Harmony, to do sophisticated improvisation over a Jazz standard. If you need to go on tour with your rock band you don't go to a Music conservatory and start interviewing musicians based on their knowledge of…
Without leet coding, named algorithms (binary search, dynamic programming, and other esoterica) or data structures (only requiring knowledge of arrays, assoc arrays, loops is enough), coding interviews still allow you to demonstrate your thinking ability. You can construct various simple problems (that require only loops and arrays) that can easily be mapped to real world problems and see how well the programmers per…
You see but here is the thing...
Let's say I am interviewing, for their corresponding roles, one of the Aerospace Engineers responsible for the design of the latest Airbus, or a specialized heart surgeon with 10 years of experience, or a Civil Engineer that lead 5 year projects building bridges crossed daily by thousands of persons.
What kind of look would they give me....If I start throwing them the type of mental puzzles like that, that you typically find on the back pages of newspapers on dentists waiting rooms:-)
I don't mind admitting Google employs people far smarter than I will ever be, but they're creating and maintaining the largest global spying apparatus in history. Maybe we should be learning from people who're actually making the world a better place.
Trust me, they aren’t THAT smart. People I know who work at Google, let’s just say: they often fit a type.
I know of the famous people that work there, and I don't have anything personal against them. My comment was more directed towards the company. I can't support the way Google and other data mining companies operate. Its such a waste of talent.
Trust me, they aren’t THAT smart. People I know who work at Google, let’s just say: they often fit a type.
There's a (semi)famous Googler in one particular area. I had a buddy who worked with him years ago at a different company and took over a project after he left. There was nothing written after nearly a year - the guy either couldn't or wouldn't code anything, and now he's a well known Googler. Obviously there are extremely talented people there, but there are some bozos mixed in too.
He probably couldn’t be bothered by such mundane work.